Yangzhou Tech

I am now a proud (and soon to be legal) resident of the People’s Republic of China. I just finished my first week of teaching at Yangzhou Polytechnic Institute, and I have successfully located a bank, a grocery store, and multiple pizza places. The search for the bar that is rumored to be fairly decent (apparently there’s only one) begins this weekend.

I’m still settling in and trying to come to terms with the fact that they actually have seasons here and that I seem to have caught the tail-end of winter (two weeks ago I was laying on a beach in Krabi), but it’s going as well as can be expected.

The fact that I showed up here with one pair of khakis, four long-sleeved shirts, and one fleece, means I have gotten to know the downtown shopping district rather well in the past week. It’s been a bit overwhelming after four months in Chaiyaphum, where the biggest shopping decision to be made was which floor of the Tesco should I start on? But I can tell you that KFC and Pizza Hut both taste better in China, the coffee is even worse than in Thailand (no small feat), and the only people who will admit to speaking any English here are elementary school kids who look like they go to private school.

The English in Yangzhou may actually be worse than it was in Chaiyaphum, but it could just be that people here aren’t quite as interested in where I’m going and where I come from. Either way, there’s been quite a bit of miming and pointing in the past week, and my Lonely Planet phrasebook gets plenty of use.

I’m not quite the celebrity I was in Chaiyaphum, where I couldn’t walk two blocks in any direction without someone yelling, “Where you go?”, but I definitely stick out in a crowd. Small children stare at me the way they might inspect a Panda bear at the zoo, and the only other white people I’ve come across so far are the other English teacher at our school and two guys having lunch at the Pizza Hut downtown.

It is definitely a different world here, from home and from Thailand. A few of the stranger things I’ve noticed in my first week-and-a-half in Yangzhou:

– The teachers live in dorm rooms on campus here. As a foreign teacher, I have a bedroom, living room and kitchen to myself, but the local teachers have roommates and shared kitchens. It’s two per room mostly, in dorm rooms not too much bigger than in an American college, but on the top floor of my building they have four teachers sharing each room!

– Public bus rides are an experience. It’s just 1 yuan no matter how far you go and the bus lines seem to go just about everywhere, but they will pack you in until the doors are blocked to the point that they can’t close. And even then, some drivers will drive with the doors open to let a few extra passengers stand in the doorway and hold on.

– Everything you’ve heard about comic English translations on products is probably true. My cooking oil advertises that it comes from corn “embryos” and the best coffee I’ve been able to find is called “Mr. Bond” and comes with the tagline, “I’m young, I’m coffee.”

– I’ll write a lot more about this as I get a better idea of what is actually true, but it’s hard to figure out what makes this a Communist country. It’s definitely a one-party state, and that party calls itself the Communist Party, but at least here in Yangzhou the economy appears to run more or less the way it did in Bethesda, Maryland. There are privately-owned businesses everywhere you look, many of them are housed in very tall, modern buildings, and there is advertising all over the place. I’ve spent much of the past week walking from one privately-owned shopping center or pedestrian mall to another, and the sign in front of the large construction site across the street from our school proclaims that the apartment building they are building there will be a “Wealth, Market Leader.”

Yangzhou is part of a designated ‘Special Economic Zone,’ which means it is an area where the government allows free-market capitalism. Presumably, the system is still Communism outside of these special zones, but if you take a look at the size of the ‘Special Economic Zones,’ which I believe are continuing to expand, it looks like it will only be a matter of time before this becomes a Special Economic Country.